1728-1779
CAPTAIN COOK IN AMERICA
The English Navigator sent Two Hundred Years later to find the New
Albion of Drake's Discoveries--He misses both the Straits of Fuca and
the Mouth of the Columbia, but anchors at Nootka, the Rendezvous of
Future Traders--No Northeast Passage found through Alaska--The True
Cause of Cook's Murder in Hawaii told by Ledyard--Russia becomes
Jealous of his Explorations
It seems impossible that after all his arduous labors and death, to
prove his convictions, Bering's conclusions should have been rejected
by the world of learning. Surely his coasting westward, southwestward,
abreast the long arm of Alaska's peninsula for a thousand miles, should
have proved that no open sea--no Northeast Passage--was here, between
Asia and America. But no! the world of learning said fog had obscured
Bering's observations. What he took for the mainland of America had
been only a chain of islands. Northward of those islands was open sea
between Asia and Europe, which might afford direct passage between East
and West without circumnavigating the globe. In fact, said Dr.
Campbell, {173} one of the most learned English writers of the day,
"Nothing is plainer than that his (Bering's) discovery does not warrant
any such supposition as that he touched the great continent making part
of North America."
The moonshine of the learned men in France and Russia was even wilder.
They had definitely proved, _even if there were no Gamaland_--as
Bering's voyage had shown--then there must be a southern continent
somewhere, to keep the balance between the northern and southern
hemispheres; else the world would turn upside down. And there must
also be an ocean between northern Europe and northern Asia, else the
world would be top-heavy and turn upside down. It was an age when the
world accepted creeds for piety, and learned moonshine instead of
scientific data; when, in a word, men refused to bow to fact!
All sorts of wild rumors were current. There was a vast continent in
the south. There was a vast sea in the north. Somewhere was the New
Albion, which Francis Drake had found north of New Spain. Just north
of the Spanish possessions in America was a wide inlet leading straight
through from the Pacific to the Atlantic, which an old Greek
pilot--named Juan de Fuca--said he had traversed for the viceroy of New
Spain.
Even stolid-going England was infected by the rage for imaginary oceans
and continents. The Hudson's Bay Fur Company was threatened with a
withdrawal {174} of its charter because it had failed to find a
Northwest Passage from Atlantic to Pacific. Only four years after the
death of Bering, an act of Parliament offered a reward of twenty
thousand pounds to the officers and crew of any ships discovering a
passage between Atlantic and Pacific north of 52 degrees. There were
even ingenious fellows with the letters of the Royal Society behind
their names, who affected to think that the great Athabasca Lake, which
Hearne had found, when he tramped inland from the Arctic and Coppermine
River, was a strait leading to the Pacific. Athabasca Lake might be
the imaginary strait of the Greek pilot, Juan de Fuca. To be sure, two
Hudson's Bay Company ships' crews--those under Knight and Barlow--had
been totally lost fifty years before Hearne's tramp inland in 1771,
trying to find that same mythical strait of Juan de Fuca westward of
Hudson Bay.
But so furious did public opinion wax over a Northwest Passage at the
very time poor Bering was dying in the North Pacific, that Captain
Middleton was sent to Hudson Bay in 1741-1742 to find a way to the
Pacific. And when Middleton failed to find water where the Creator had
placed land, Dobbs, the patron of the expedition and champion of a
Northwest Passage at once roused the public to send out two more
ships--the _Dobbs_ and _California_. Failure again! Theories never
yet made Fact, never so much as added a hair's weight to Fact! Ellis,
who was on board, affected to think that Chesterfield Inlet--a great
arm of the sea, {175} westward of Hudson Bay--might lead to the
Pacific. This supposition was promptly exploded by the Hudson's Bay
Fur Company sending Captain Christopher and Moses Norton, the local
governor of the company, up Chesterfield inlet for two hundred miles,
where they found, not the Pacific, but a narrow river. Then the hue
and cry of the learned theorists was--the Northwest Passage lay
northward of Hudson Bay. Hearne was sent tramping inland to find--not
sea, but land; and when he returned with the report of the great
Athabasca Lake of Mackenzie River region, the lake was actually seized
on as proof that there was a waterway to the Pacific. Then the
brilliant plan was conceived to send ships by both the Atlantic and the
Pacific to find this mythical passage from Europe to Asia.
Pickersgill, who had been on the Pacific, was to go out north of Hudson
Bay and work westward. To work eastward from the Pacific to the
Atlantic was chosen a man who had already proved there was no great
continental mass on the south, and that the world did not turn upside
down, and who was destined to prove there was no great open ocean on
the north, and still the world did not turn upside down. He was a man
whose whole life had been based and built upon Fact, not Theory. He
was a man who accepted Truth as God gave it to him, not as he had
theorized it _ought_ to be; a man who had climbed from a mud cottage to
the position of the greatest navigator in the world--had climbed on top
of facts mastered, not {176} of schoolgirl moonshine, or study-closet
theories. That man was Captain James Cook.
Cook's life presents all the contrasts of true greatness world over.
Like Peter the Great, of Russia, whose word had set in motion the
exploration of the northwest coast of America, Cook's character
consisted of elements that invariably lead to glory or ruin; often,
both. The word "impossible" was not in his vocabulary. He simply did
not recognize any limitations to what a man _might_ do, could do, would
do, if he tried; and that means, that under stress of risk or
temptation, or opposition, a man's caution goes to the winds. With
Cook, it was risk that caused ruin. With the Czar of Russia, it was
temptation.
Born at Marton, a small parish of a north riding in the county of York,
October 27, 1728, James Cook was the son of a day-laborer in an age
when manual toil was paid at the rate of a few pennies a day. There
were nine of a family. The home was a thatch-roofed mud cottage. Two
years after Cook's birth, the father was appointed bailiff, which
slightly improved family finances; but James was thirteen years of age
before it was possible to send him to school. There, the progress of
his learning was a gallop. He had a wizard-genius for figures. In
three short years he had mastered all the Ayton school could teach him.
At sixteen, his schooling was over. The father's highest ambition
seems to have been for the son to become a successful shopkeeper in one
of the small towns. The future {177} navigator was apprenticed to the
village shop; but Cook's ambitions were not to be caged behind a
counter.
Eastward rolled the North Sea. Down at Hull were heard seamen's yarns
to make the blood of a boy jump. It was 1746. The world was ringing
with tales of Bering on the Pacific, of a southern continent, which
didn't exist, of the Hudson's Bay Fur Company's illimitable domain in
the north, of La Vérendrye's wonderful discoveries of an almost
boundless region westward of New France toward the uncharted Western
Sea. In a year and a half, Cook had his fill of shopkeeping. Whether
he ran away, or had served his master so well that the latter willingly
remitted the three years' articles of apprenticeship, Cook now followed
his destiny to the sea. According to the world's standards, the change
seemed progress backward. He was articled to a ship-owner of Whitby as
a common seaman on a coaler sailing between Newcastle and London. One
can see such coalers any day--black as smut, grimed from prow to stern,
with workmen almost black shovelling coal or hoisting tackling--pushing
in and out among the statelier craft of any seaport. It is this stage
in a great man's career which is the test. Is the man sure enough of
himself to leave everything behind, and jump over the precipice into
the unknown? If ever he wishes to return to what he has left, he will
have just the height of this jump to climb back to the old place. The
old place is a certainty. The unknown may engulf in failure. He {178}
must chance that, and all for the sake of a faith in himself, which has
not yet been justified; for the sake of a vague star leading into the
misty unknown. He knows that he could have been successful in the old
place. He does not know that he may not be a failure in the new place.
Art, literature, science, commerce--in all--it is the men and women who
have dared to risk being failures that have proved the mainspring of
progress. Cook was sure enough of himself to exchange shopkeeper's
linen for the coal-heaver's blue jeans, to risk following the star of
his destiny to the sea.
Presently, the commonplace, grimy duties which he must fulfil are
taking him to Dublin, to Liverpool, to Norway; and by the time he is
twenty-two, he knows the Baltic trade well, and has heard all the pros
and cons of the furious cackle which the schools have raised over that
expedition of Bering's to the west coast of America. By the time he is
twenty-four he is a first mate on the coal boats. Comes another vital
change! When he left the shop, he felt all that he had to do to follow
his destiny was to go to sea. Now the star has led him up to a blank
wall. The only promotion he can obtain on these merchantmen is to a
captainship; and the captaincy on a small merchantman will mean pretty
much a monotonous flying back and forward like a shuttle between the
ports of Europe and England.
Cook took a resolution that would have cost any {179} man but one with
absolute singleness of purpose a poignant effort. At the age of
twenty-seven, he decided to enter the Royal Navy. Now, in a democratic
age, we don't talk about such things; but there are unwritten laws and
invisible lines just the same. Standing on the captain's deck of an
American warship not long ago, watching the deck hands below putting
things shipshape, I asked an officer--"Is there any chance for those
men to rise?"
"Yes, some," he answered tentatively, "but then, there is a difference
between the men who have been trained for a position, and those who
have worked up the line to it." If that difference exists in a
democratic country and age, what was it for Cook in a country and at a
time when lines of caste were hard and fast drawn? But he entered the
navy on the _Eagle_ under Sir Hugh Palliser, who, almost at once,
transferred him from the forecastle to the quarterdeck. What was the
explanation of such quick recognition? Therein lies the difference
between the man who tries and succeeds, and the man who tries and
fails. Cook had qualified himself for promotion. He was so fitted for
the higher position, that the higher position could not do without him.
Whether rocking on the Baltic, or waiting for the stokers to heave out
coal at Liverpool, every moment not occupied by seaman's duties, Cook
had filled by improving himself, by increasing his usefulness, by
sharpening his brain, so that his brain could better direct his hands,
by {180} studying mathematics and astronomy and geography and science
and navigation. As some one has said--there are lots of people with
hands and no brain; and there are lots of people with brains and no
hands; but the kind who will command the highest reward for their
services to the world are those who have the finest combination of
brains _and_ hands.
[Illustration: Captain James Cook.]
Four years after Cook had joined the navy, he was master on the
_Mercury_ with the fleet before Quebec, making a chart of the St.
Lawrence for Wolfe to take the troops up to the Heights of Abraham,
piloting the boats to the attack on Montmorency, and conducting the
embarkation of the troops, who were to win the famous battle, that
changed the face of America.
Now the Royal Society wished to send some one to the South Seas, whose
reliability was of such a recognized and steady-going sort, that his
conclusions would be accepted by the public. Just twenty years from
the time that he had left the shop, Cook was chosen for this important
mission. What manner of man was he, who in that time had risen from
life in a mud hut to the rank of a commander in the Royal Navy? In
manner, he was plain and simple and direct, no flourish, no unnecessary
palaver of showy words, not a word he did not mean. In form, he was
six feet tall, in perfect proportion, with brown hair and eyes, alertly
penetrating, with features sharp rather from habit or thought than from
natural shape.
On this mission he left England in 1768, anchored at {181} the Society
Islands of the South Seas in the spring of 1769, explored New Zealand
in the fall of the same year, rounded Australia in 1770 and returned to
England in 1771, the very year Hearne was trying to tramp it overland
in search of a Northwest Passage. And he brought back no proof of that
vast southern world which geographers had put on their maps. Promptly
he was sent out on a second voyage to find or demolish that mythical
continent of the southern hemisphere; and he demolished the myth of a
southern continent altogether, returning from circumnavigating the
globe just at the time when the furor of a Northwest Passage northward
of Hudson Bay, northward even of Bering's course on the Pacific, was at
its height.
The third voyage was to determine finally the bounds of western
America, the possibilities of a passage between Europe and Asia by way
of the Pacific. Two ships--the _Resolution_, four hundred and sixty
tons, one hundred and twelve men, which Cook had used before, and the
_Discovery_, three hundred tons, eighty men--were purchased at Hull,
the old port of Cook's boyhood dreams. To secure the good will of the
crews, two months' wages were paid in advance. Captain Clerke
commanded the _Discovery_; and the two crews numbered men of whom the
world was to hear more in connection with the northwest coast of
America--a young midshipman, Vancouver, whose doings were yet to
checkmate Spain; a young American, corporal {182} of marines, Ledyard,
who was to have his brush with Russia; and other ambitious young seamen
destined to become famous traders on the west coast of America.
The two ships left England in midsummer of 1776, crossed the equator in
September when every man fresh to the episode was caught and ducked
overrails in equatorial waters, rounded Good Hope, touched at the
Society Islands of the first voyage, and by spring of 1778 had explored
and anchored at the Sandwich Islands. Once on the Pacific, Cook
mustered his crews and took them into his confidence; he was going to
try for that reward of twenty thousand pounds to the crew that
discovered a Northeast Passage; and even if he missed the reward, he
was going to have a shy at the most northern latitude ever attempted by
navigator--89 degrees; would they do it? The crew cheered. Whether
they reached 89 degrees or not, they decided to preserve their grog for
the intense cold to be encountered in the north; so that the daily
allowance was now cut to half.
By March, the ships were off from the Sandwich Islands to the long
swell of the Pacific, the slimy medusa lights covering the waters with
a phosphorescent trail of fire all night, the rockweed and sea leek
floating past by day telling their tale of some far land. Cook's
secret commission had been very explicit: "You are to proceed on as
direct a course as you can to the coast of New Albion, endeavoring to
fall in with it in latitude 45 degrees north . . . and are strictly
enjoined {183} not to touch on any part of the Spanish dominions . . .
unless driven by accident . . . and to be very careful not to give any
umbrage to the subjects of his Catholic Majesty . . . and if in further
progress northward . . . you find any subjects of a European
prince . . . you are not to give any cause of offence . . . proceed
northward to 65 degrees, carefully search for such inlets as appear
pointing to Hudson Bay . . . use your utmost endeavors to pass
through." The commission shows that England was unaware Spain had
pushed north of 45 degrees, and Russia north of 65 degrees; for Spain
jealously kept her explorations secret, and Russia's were not accepted.
The commission also offered a reward for any one going within 1 degree
of the Pole. It may be added--the offer is still open.
For days after leaving the Sandwich Islands, not a bird was to be seen.
That was a bad omen for land. Land must be far, indeed; and Cook began
to fear there might be as much ocean in that northern hemisphere as the
geographers of Russia and France--who actually tabulated Bering's
discoveries as an island--had placed on the maps. But in the first
week of March, a sea-gull came swimming over the crest of a wave.
Where did she come from? Then an albatross was seen wheeling above the
sea. Then, on March 6, two lonely land seals went plying past; and
whales were noticed. Surely they were nearing the region that Drake,
the English freebooter, had seen and named New Albion two hundred years
before. {184} Suddenly, on the morning of March 7, the dim offing
ahead showed thin, sharp, clear lines. The lines rose higher as the
ship approached. They cut themselves against the sky in the form of
mountains and hills with purple mist lying in the valleys. It was the
New Albion at latitude 44 degrees 33 minutes, which Drake had
discovered. The day was hazy and warm. Cook's crews wondered why
Drake had complained of such cold. By night they found out. A roaring
hurricane burst from the northern darkness with squalls of hail and
snow and sleet, that turned the shore to one long reach of whitened
cliffs straight up and down out of the sea. In commemoration, they
called the first landfall, Cape Foulweather; and, in spite of the
commission to sail north, drove under bare poles before the storm to 43
degrees, naming the two capes passed Perpetua and Gregory. Only by the
third week of March had the storm abated enough for them to turn north
again.[1]
Now, whether the old Greek pilot, Juan de Fuca, lied or dreamed, or
only told a yarn of what some Indian had told him, it was along this
coast that he had said the straits leading to the east side of America
lay; and Cook's two ships hugged the coast as close as they dared for
fear of roaring breakers and a landward wind. On March 23 rocks were
seen lying off a high point capped with trees, behind which might be a
{185} strait; but a gale ashore and a lashing tide thundering over the
rocks sent the ships scudding for the offing through fog and rain; and
never a glimpse of a passage eastward could the crews obtain. Cook
called the delusive point Cape Flattery and added: "It is in this very
latitude (48 degrees 15 minutes) that geographers have placed the
pretended Straits of Juan de Fuca; but we saw nothing like it; nor is
there the least possibility that any such thing ever existed." But
Cook was too far out to descry the narrow opening--but thirteen miles
wide--of Juan de Fuca, where the steamers of three continents ply
to-day; though the strait by no means led to Europe, as geographers
thought.
All night a hard gale drove them northward. When the weather cleared,
permitting them to approach the coast again, high mountains, covered
with snow and forests, jagged through the clouds like tent peaks.
Tremendous breakers roared over sunken rocks. Point Breakers, Cook
called them. Then the wind suddenly fell; and the ships were becalmed
directly opposite the narrow entrance of a two-horned cove sheltered by
the mountains. The small boats had all been mustered out to tow the
two ships in, when a slight breeze sprang up. The flotilla drifted
inland just as three canoes, carved in bizarre shapes of birds' heads
and eagle claws, came paddling across the inlet. Three savages were in
one, six in the other, ten in the third. They came slowly over the
water, singing some song of welcome, beating time with their paddles,
{186} scattering downy white feathers on the air, at intervals standing
up to harangue a welcome to the newcomers. Soon thirty canoes were
around the ships with some ten warriors in each. Still they came,
shoals of them, like fish, with savages almost naked, the harbor smooth
as glass, the grand _tyee_, or great chief of the tribes, standing
erect shouting a welcome, with long elf-locks streaming down his back.
Women and children now appeared in the canoes. That meant peace. The
women were chattering like magpies; the men gurgling and spluttering
their surprise at the white visitors. For safety's sake the guns of
the two ships were pointed ready; but the natives did not know the fear
of a gun. It was the end of March when Cook first anchored off what he
thought was the mainland of America. It was not mainland, but an
island, and the harbor was one to become famous as the rendezvous of
Pacific traders--Nootka!
Three armed boats commanded by Mr. King, and one under Cook, at once
proceeded from the ships to explore and sound the inlet. The entrance
had been between two rocky points four miles apart past a chain of
sunken rocks. Except in a northwest corner of the inlet, since known
as Snug Cove, the water was too deep for anchorage; so the two ships
were moored to trees, the masts unrigged, the iron forge set to work on
the shore; and the men began cutting timber for the new masts. And
still the tiny specks dancing over the waves carrying canoe loads of
savages to the English ships, {187} continued to multiply till the
harbor seemed alive with warriors--two thousand at least there must
have been by the first week of April after Cook's arrival. Some of the
savages wore brightly painted wooden masks as part of their gala
attire. Others carried totems--pieces of wood carved in the likeness
of bird or beast to typify manitou of family or clan. By way of
showing their prowess, some even offered the white men human skulls
from which the flesh had not yet been taken. By this Cook knew the
people were cannibals. Some were observed to be wearing spoons of
European make as ornaments round their necks. What we desire to
believe we easily accept. The white men did not ascribe the spoons to
traders from New Spain on the south, or the Russian settlements to the
north; but thought this place must be within trading distance of Hudson
Bay, whence the Indians must have obtained the spoons. And so they
cherished the hope of a Northeast Passage from this slim sign. In a
few days fifteen hundred beaver and sea-otter had been obtained in
trade, sixty-nine sea-otter--each of which was worth at that time one
hundred dollars in modern money--for a handful of old nails.
To these deep-sea wanderers of Cook's crews, the harbor was as a
fairy-land. Snow still covered the mountain tops; but a tangled forest
of dank growth with roots awash in the ripple of the sea, stretched
down the hillsides. Red cedar, spruce, fir,--of enormous growth,
broader in girth than a cart and {188} wagon in length,--cypress with
twisted and gnarled knots red against the rank green; mosses swinging
from branch to branch in snaky coils wherever the clouds settled and
rested; islands studding the sea like emerald gems; grouse drumming
their spring song through the dark underbrush; sea-mew and Mother
Carey's chickens screaming and clacking overhead; the snowy summits red
as wine in the sunset glow--all made up an April scene long cherished
by these adventurers of the North.
Early one morning in April the men cutting timber inland were startled
to notice the underbrush alive with warriors armed. The first fear was
of an ambush. Cook ordered the men to an isolated rock ready for
defence; but the grand _tyee_ or chief explained by signs that his
tribe was only keeping off another tribe that wanted to trade with the
white men. The worst trouble was from the inordinate thieving
propensities of the natives. Iron, nails, belaying pins, rudders,
anchors, bits of sail, a spike that could be pulled from the rotten
wood of the outer keel by the teeth of a thief paddling
below--anything, everything was snatched by the light-fingered gentry.
Nor can we condemn them for it. Their moral standard was the Wolf Code
of Existence--which the white man has elaborated in his evolution--to
take whatever they had the dexterity and strength to take and to keep.
When caught in theft, they did not betray as much sense of guilt as a
dog stealing a bone. Why should they? Their {189} code was to take.
The chief of the Nootkas presented Cook with a sea-otter cloak. Cook
reciprocated with a brass-hilted sword.
By the end of April the ships had been overhauled, and Cook was ready
to sail. Porpoise were coursing the sea like greyhounds, and the
stormy petrels in a clatter; but Cook was not to be delayed by storm.
Barely had the two ships cleared the harbor, when such a squall broke
loose, they could do nothing but scud for open sea, turn tails to the
wind, and lie helpless as logs, heads south. If it had not been for
this storm, Cook would certainly have discovered that Nootka was on an
island, not the coast of the mainland; but by the time the weather
permitted an approach to land again, Friday, May 1, the ships were
abreast that cluster of islands below the snowy cone of Mt. Edgecumbe,
Sitka, where Chirikoff's Russians had first put foot on American soil.
Cook was now at the northernmost limit of Spanish voyaging.
By the 4th of May Cook had sighted and passed the Fairweather Range,
swung round westward on the old course followed by Bering, and passed
under the shadow of St. Elias towering through the clouds in a dome of
snow. On the 6th the ships were at Kyak, where Bering had anchored,
and amid myriad ducks and gulls were approaching a broad inlet
northward. Now, just as Bering had missed exploring this part of the
coast owing to fog, so Cook had failed to trace that long archipelago
of islands from Sitka Sound {190} northward; but here, where the coast
trends straight westward, was an opening that roused hopes of a
Northeast Passage. The _Resolution_ had sprung a leak; and in the
second week of May, the inlet was entered in the hope of a shelter to
repair the leak and a way northeast to the Atlantic. Barely had the
ships passed up the sound, when they were enshrouded in a fog that
wiped out every outline; otherwise, the high coast of glacial
palisades--two hundred feet in places and four miles broad--might have
been seen landlocked by mountains; but Mr. Gore launched out in a small
boat steering north through haze and tide-rip. Twenty natives were
seen clad in sea-otter skins, by which--the white men judged--no
Russians could have come to this sound; for the Russians would not have
permitted the Indians to keep such valuable sea-otter clothing. The
glass beads possessed by the natives were supposed to attest proximity
to traders of Hudson Bay. With an almost animal innocence of wrong,
the Indians tried to steal the small boat of the _Discovery_,
flourishing their spears till the white crew mustered. At another
time, when the _Discovery_ lay anchored, few lanterns happened to be on
deck. No sailors were visible. It was early in the morning and
everybody was asleep, the boat dark. The natives swarmed up the ship's
sides like ants invading a sugar canister. Looking down the hatches
without seeing any whites, they at once drew their knives and began to
plunder. The whites dashed up the hatchway and drove the {191}
plunderers over the rails at sword point. East and north the small
boats skirted the mist-draped shores, returning at midnight with word
the inlet was a closed shore. There was no Northeast Passage. They
called the spider-shaped bay Prince William Sound; and at ten in the
morning headed out for sea.
Here a fresh disappointment awaited them. The natives of Prince
William Sound had resembled the Eskimos of Greenland so much that the
explorers were prepared to find themselves at the westward end of the
American continent ready to round north into the Atlantic. A long
ledge of land projected into the sea. They called this Cape Elizabeth,
passed it, noted the reef of sunken rocks lying directly athwart a
terrific tidal bore, and behold! not the end of the continent--no, not
by a thousand miles--but straight across westward, beneath a smoking
volcano that tinged the fog ruby-red, a lofty, naked spur three miles
out into the sea, with crest hidden among the clouds and rock-base
awash in thundering breakers. This was called Cape Douglas. Between
these two capes was a tidal flood of perhaps sixty miles' breadth.
Where did it come from? Up went hopes again for the Northeast Passage,
and the twenty thousand pounds! Spite of driftwood, and roily waters,
and a flood that ran ten miles an hour, and a tidal bore that rose
twenty feet, up the passage they tacked, east to west, west to east,
plying up half the month of June in rain and sleet, with the heavy pall
of black smoke {192} rolling from the volcano left far on the offing!
At last the opening was seen to turn abruptly straight east. Out
rattled the small boats. Up the muddy waters they ran for nine miles
till salt water became fresh water, and the explorers found themselves
on a river. In irony, this point was called Turn-Again. The whole bay
is now known as Cook's Inlet. Mr. King was sent ashore on the south
side of Turn-Again to take possession. Twenty natives in sea-otter
skins stood by watching the ceremony of flag unfurled and the land of
their fathers being declared the possession of England. These natives
were plainly acquainted with the use of iron; but "I will be bold to
say," relates Cook, "they do not know the Russians, or they would not
be wearing these valuable sea-otter skins."
No Northeast Passage here! So out they ply again for open sea through
misty weather; and when it clears, they are in the green treeless
region west of Cook's Inlet. Past Kadiak, past Bering's Foggy Island,
past the Shumagins where Bering's first sailor to die of scurvy had
been buried, past volcanoes throwing up immense quantities of blood-red
smoke, past pinnacled rocks, through mists so thick the roar of the
breakers is their only guide, they glide, or drift, or move by inches
feeling the way cautiously, fearful of wreck.
Toward the end of June a great hollow green swell swings them through
the straits past Oonalaska, northward at last! Natives are seen in
green trousers {193} and European shirts; natives who take off their
hats and make a bow after the pompous fashion of the Russians.
Twice natives bring word to Cook by letter and sign that the Russians
of Oonalaska wish to see him. But Captain Cook is not anxious to see
the Russians just now. He wants to forestall their explorations
northward and take possession of the Polar realm for England. In
August they are in Bristol Bay, north of the Aleutians, directly
opposite Asia. Here Dr. Anderson, the surgeon, dies of consumption.
Not so much fog now. They can follow the mainland. Far ahead there
projects straight out in the sea a long spit of land backed by high
hills, the westernmost point of North America--Cape Prince of Wales!
Bering is vindicated! Just fifty years from Bering's exploration of
1728, the English navigator finds what Bering found: that America and
Asia are _not_ united; that no Northeast Passage exists; that no great
oceanic body lies north of New Spain; that Alaska--as the Russian maps
had it after Bering's death--is not an island.
Wind, rain, roily, shoaly seas breaking clear over the ship across
decks drove Cook out from land to deeper water. With an Englishman's
thoroughness for doing things and to make deadly sure just how the two
continents lay to each other, Cook now scuds across Bering Strait
thirty-nine miles to the Chukchee land of Siberia in Asia. How he
praises the accuracy of poor {194} Bering's work along this coast:
Bering, whose name had been a target for ridicule and contempt from the
time of his death; whose death was declared a blunder; whose voyage was
considered a failure; whose charts had been rejected and distorted by
the learned men of the world.
[Illustration: The Ice Islands.]
From the Chukchee villages of Asia, Cook sailed back to the American
coast, passing north of Bering Straits directly in mid-channel. It is
an odd thing, while very little ice-drift is met in Bering Sea, you
have no sooner passed north of the straits than a white world surrounds
you. Fog, ice, ice, fog--endlessly, with palisades of ice twelve feet
high, east and west, far as the eye can see! The crew amuse themselves
alternately gathering driftwood for fuel, and hunting {195} walrus over
the ice. It is in the North Pacific that the walrus attains its great
size--nine feet in length, broader across its back than any animal
known to the civilized world. These piebald yellow monsters lay
wallowing in herds of hundreds on the ice-fields. At the edge lay
always one on the watch; and no matter how dense the fog, these walrus
herds on the ice, braying and roaring till the surf shook, acted as a
fog-horn to Cook's ships, and kept them from being jammed in the
ice-drift. Soon two-thirds of the furs got at Nootka had spoiled of
rain-rot. The vessels were iced like ghost ships. Tack back and
forward as they might, no passage opened through the ice. Suddenly
Cook found himself in shoal water, on a lee shore, long and low and
shelving, with the ice drifting on his ships. He called the place Icy
Cape. It was their farthest point north; and the third week of August
they were compelled to scud south to escape the ice. Backing away
toward Asia, he reached the North Cape there. It was almost September.
In accordance with the secret instructions, Cook turned south to winter
at the Sandwich Islands, passing Serdze Kamen, where Bering had turned
back in 1728, East Cape on the Straits of Bering just opposite the
American Prince of Wales, and St. Lawrence islands where the ships
anchored.
Norton Sound was explored on the way back; and October saw Cook down at
Oonalaska, where Ledyard was sent overland across the island to conduct
the {196} Russian traders to the English ships. Three Russians came to
visit Cook. One averred that he had been with Bering on the expedition
of 1741, and the rough adventurers seemed almost to worship the Dane's
memory. Later came Ismyloff, chief factor of the Russian fur posts in
Oonalaska, attended by a retinue of thirty native canoes, very suave as
to manners, very polished and pompous when he was not too convivial,
but very chary of any information to the English, whose charts he
examined with keenest interest, giving them to understand that the
Empress of Russia had first claim to all those parts of the country,
rising, quaffing a glass and bowing profoundly as he mentioned the
august name. "Friends and fellow-countrymen glorious," the English
were to the smooth-tongued Russian, as they drank each other's health.
Learning that Cook was to visit Avacha Bay, Ismyloff proffered a letter
of introduction to Major Behm, Russian commander of Kamchatka. Cook
thought the letter one of commendation. It turned out otherwise. Fur
traders, world over, always resented the coming of the explorer.
Ismyloff was neither better nor worse than his kind.[2]
Heavy squalls pursued the ships all the way from Oonalaska, left on
October 26, to the Sandwich Islands, reached in the new year 1779. A
thousand canoes of enthusiastic natives welcomed Cook back to the sunny
islands of the Pacific. Before the explorer {197} could anchor,
natives were swimming round the ship like shoals of fish. When Cook
landed, the whole population prostrated itself at his feet as if he had
been a god. It was a welcome change from the desolate cold of the
inhospitable north.
Situated midway in the Pacific, the Sandwich Islands were like an oasis
in a watery waste to Cook's mariners. The ships had dropped anchor in
the centre of a horn-shaped bay called Karakakooa, in Hawaii, about two
miles from horn to horn. On the sandy flats of the north horn was the
native village of Kowrowa: amid the cocoanut grove of the other horn,
the village of Kakooa, with a well and Morai, or sacred burying-ground,
close by. Between the two villages alongshore ran a high ledge of
black coral rocks. In all there were, perhaps, four hundred houses in
the two villages, with a population of from two to three thousand
warriors; but the bay was the rallying place for the entire group of
islands; and the islands numbered in all several hundred thousand
warriors.
Picture, then, the scene to these wanderers of the northern seas: the
long coral reef, wave-washed by bluest of seas; the little village and
burying-ground and priests' houses nestling under the cocoanut grove at
one end of the semicircular bay, the village where Terreeoboo, king of
the island, dwelt on the long sand beach at the other end; and swimming
through the water like shoals of fish, climbing over the ships' rigging
like monkeys, crowding the decks of the _Discovery_ {198} so that the
ship heeled over till young chief Pareea began tossing the intruders by
the scuff of the neck back into the sea--hundreds, thousands, of
half-naked, tawny-skinned savages welcoming the white men back to the
islands discovered by them. Chief among the visitors to the ship was
Koah, a little, old, emaciated, shifty-eyed priest with a wry neck and
a scaly, leprous skin, who at once led the small boats ashore, driving
the throngs back with a magic wand and drawing a mystic circle with his
wizard stick round a piece of ground near the Morai, or burying-place,
where the white men could erect their tents beside the cocoanut groves.
The magic line was called a _taboo_. Past the tabooed line of the
magic wand not a native would dare to go. Here Captain King, assisted
by the young midshipman, Vancouver, landed with a guard of eight or ten
mariners to overhaul the ships' masts, while the rest of the two crews
obtained provisions by trade.
Cook was carried off to the very centre of the Morai--a circular
enclosure of solid stone with images and priests' houses at one end,
the skulls of slain captives at the other. Here priests and people did
the white explorer homage as to a god, sacrificing to him their most
sacred animal--a strangled pig.
All went well for the first few days. A white gunner, who died, was
buried within the sacred enclosure of the Morai. The natives loaded
the white men's boats with provisions. In ten days the wan, gaunt
{199} sailors were so sleek and fat that even the generous entertainers
had to laugh at the transformation. Old King Terreeoboo came clothed
in a cloak of gaudy feathers with spears and daggers at his belt and a
train of priestly retainers at his heels to pay a visit of state to
Cook; and a guard of mariners was drawn up at arms under the cocoanut
grove to receive the visitor with fitting honor. When the king learned
that Cook was to leave the bay early in February, a royal proclamation
gathered presents for the ships; and Cook responded by a public display
of fireworks.
Now it is a sad fact that when a highly civilized people meet an
uncivilized people, each race celebrates the occasion by appropriating
all the evil qualities of the other. Vices, not virtues, are the first
to fraternize. It was as unfair of Cook's crew to judge the islanders
by the rabble swarming out to steal from the ships, as it would be for
a newcomer to judge the people of New York by the pickpockets and
under-world of the water front. And it must not be forgotten that the
very quality that had made Cook successful--the quality to dare--was a
danger to him here. The natives did not violate the sacred _taboo_,
which the priest had drawn round the white men's quarters of the grove.
It was the white men who violated it by going outside the limit; and
the conduct of the white sailors for the sixteen days in port was
neither better nor worse than the conduct of sailors to-day who go on a
wild spree with the lowest elements of the harbor. {200} The savages
were quick to find out that the white gods were after all only men.
The true story of what happened could hardly be written by Captain
King, who finished Cook's journal; though one can read between the
lines King's fear of his commander's rashness. The facts of the case
are given by the young American, John Ledyard, of Connecticut, who was
corporal of marines and in the very thick of the fight.
At the end of two weeks the white seamen were, perhaps, satiated of
their own vices, or suffering from the sore head that results from
prolonged spreeing. At all events the thieving, which had been
condoned at first, was now punished by soundly flogging the natives.
The old king courteously hinted it was time for the white men to go.
The mate, who was loading masts and rudder back on board the
_Resolution_, asked the savages to give him a hand. The islanders had
lost respect for the white men of such flagrant vices. They pretended
to give a helping hand, but only jostled the mate about in the crowd.
The Englishman lost his temper, struck out, and blustered. The shore
rang with the shrill laughter of the throngs. In vain the chiefs of
authority interposed. The commands to help the white men were answered
by showers of stones directly inside the _taboo_. Ledyard was ordered
out with a guard of sailors to protect the white men loading the
_Resolution_. The guard was pelted black and blue. "There was nothing
to do," relates Ledyard, "but move to new lands where our vices {201}
were not known." At last all was in readiness to sail--one thing alone
lacking--wood; and the white men dare not go inland for the needed wood.
So far the entire blame rested on the sailors. Now Cook committed his
cardinal error. With that very dare and quickness to utilize every
available means to an end--whether the end justified the means--Cook
ordered his men ashore to seize the rail fence round the top of the
stone burying-ground--the sacred Morai--as fuel for his ships. Out
rushed the priests from the enclosure in dire distress. Was this their
reward for protecting Cook with the wand of the sacred _taboo_? Two
hatchets were offered the leading priest as pay. He spurned them as
too loathsome to be touched. Leading the way, Cook ordered his men to
break the fence down, and proffered three hatchets, thrusting them into
the folds of the priest's garment. Pale and quivering with rage, the
priest bade a slave remove the profaning iron. Down tumbled the fence!
Down the images on poles! Down the skulls of the dead sacred to the
savage as the sepulchre to the white man! It may be said to the credit
of the crew, that the men were thoroughly frightened at what they were
ordered to do; but they were not too frightened to carry away the
images as relics. Cook alone was blind to risk. As if to add the last
straw to the Hawaiians' endurance, when the ships unmoored and sailed
out from the bay, where but two weeks before they had been so royally
welcomed, they carried {202} eloping wives and children from the lower
classes of the two villages.
It was one of the cases where retribution came so swift it was like a
living Nemesis. If the weather had continued fair, doubtless wives and
children would have been dumped off at some near harbor, the incident
considered a joke, and the Englishmen gone merrily on their way; but a
violent gale arose. Women and children were seized with a seasickness
that was no joke. The decks resounded with such wails that Cook had to
lie to in the storm, put off the pinnace, and send the visitors ashore.
What sort of a tale they carried back, we may guess. Meanwhile the
storm had snapped the foremast of the _Resolution_. As if rushing on
his ruin, Cook steered back for the bay and anchored midway between the
two villages. Again the tents were pitched beside the Morai under the
cocoanut groves. Again the wand was drawn round the tenting place; but
the white men had taught the savages that the _taboo_ was no longer
sacred. Where thousands had welcomed the ships before, not a soul now
appeared. Not a canoe cut the waters. Not a voice broke the silence
of the bay.
The sailors were sour; Cook, angry. When the men rowed to the villages
for fresh provisions, they were pelted with stones. When at night-time
the savages came to the ships with fresh food, they asked higher prices
and would take only daggers and knives in pay. Only by firing its
great guns could the {203} _Discovery_ prevent forcible theft by the
savages offering provisions; and in the scuffle of pursuit after one
thief, Pareea--a chief most friendly to the whites--was knocked down by
a white man's oar. "I am afraid," remarked Cook, "these people will
compel me to use violent measures." As if to test the mettle of the
tacit threat, Sunday, daybreak, February 14, revealed that the large
rowboat of the _Discovery_ had been stolen.
When Captain King, who had charge of the guard repairing the masts over
under the cocoanut grove came on board Sunday morning, he found Cook
loading his gun, with a line of soldiers drawn up to go ashore in order
to allure the ruler of the islands on board, and hold him as hostage
for the restitution of the lost boat. Clerke, of the _Discovery_, was
too far gone in consumption to take any part. Cook led the way on the
pinnace with Ledyard and six marines. Captain King followed in the
launch with as many more. All the other small boats of the two ships
were strung across the harbor from Kakooa, where the grove was, to
Kowrowa, where the king dwelt, with orders to fire on any canoe trying
to escape.
Before the fearless leader, the savages prostrated themselves in the
streets. Cook strode like a conqueror straight to the door of the
king's abode. It was about nine in the morning. Old Terreeoboo--peace
lover and lazy--was just awake and only too willing to go aboard with
Cook as the easiest way out {204} of the trouble about the stolen boat.
But just here the high-handedness of Cook frustrated itself. That line
of small boats stretched across the harbor began firing at an escaping
canoe. A favorite chief was killed. Word of the killing came as the
old king was at the water's edge to follow Cook; and a wife caught him
by the arm to drag him back. Suddenly a throng of a thousand
surrounded the white men. Some one stabs at Phillips of the marines.
Phillips's musket comes down butt-end on the head of the assailant. A
spear is thrust in Cook's very face. He fires blank shot. The
harmlessness of the shot only emboldens the savages. Women are seen
hurrying off to the hills; men don their war mats. There is a rush of
the white men to get positions along the water edge free for striking
room; of the savages to prevent the whites' escape. A stone hits Cook.
"What man did that?" thunders Cook; and he shoots the culprit dead.
Then the men in the boats lose their heads, and are pouring volleys of
musketry into the crowds.
"It is hopeless," mutters Cook to Phillips; but amid a shower of stones
above the whooping of the savages, he turns with his back to the crowd,
and shouts for the two small boats to cease firing and pull in for the
marines. His caution came too late.
His back is to his assailants. An arm reached out--a hand with a
dagger; and the dagger rips quick as a flash under Cook's
shoulder-blade. He fell without a groan, face in the water, and was
hacked to pieces {205} before the eyes of his men. Four marines had
already fallen. Phillips and Ledyard and the rest jumped into the sea
and swam for their lives. The small boats were twenty yards out.
Scarcely was Phillips in the nearest, when a wounded sailor, swimming
for refuge, fainted and sank to the bottom. Though half stunned from a
stone blow on his head and bleeding from a stab in the back, Phillips
leaped to the rescue, dived to bottom, caught the exhausted sailor by
the hair of the head and so snatched him into the boat. The dead and
the arms of the fugitives had been deserted in the wild scramble for
life.
[Illustration: The Death of Cook.]
Meanwhile the masts of the _Resolution_, guarded by {206} only six
marines, were exposed to the warriors of the other village at the
cocoanut grove. Protected by the guns of the two ships under the
direction of Clerke, who now became commander, masts and men were got
aboard by noon. At four that afternoon, Captain King rowed toward
shore for Cook's body. He was met by the little leprous priest Koah,
swimming halfway out. Though tears of sorrow were in Koah's
treacherous red-rimmed eyes as he begged that Clerke and King might
come ashore to parley. King judged it prudent to hold tightly on the
priest's spear handle while the two embraced.
Night after night for a week, the conch-shells blew their challenge of
defiance to the white men. Fires rallying to war danced on the
hillsides. Howls and shouts of derision echoed from the shore. The
stealthy paddle of treacherous spies could be heard through the dark
under the keel of the white men's ships. Cook's clothing, sword, hat,
were waved in scorn under the sailors' faces. The women had hurried to
the hills. The old king was hidden in a cave, where he could be
reached only by a rope ladder; and emissary after emissary tried to
lure the whites ashore. One pitch-dark night, paddles were heard under
the keels. The sentinels fired; but by lantern light two terrified
faces appeared above the rail of the _Resolution_. Two frightened,
trembling savages crawled over the deck, prostrated themselves at
Clerke's feet, and slowly unrolled a small wrapping of cloth that
revealed a small {207} piece of human flesh--the remains of Cook. Dead
silence fell on the horrified crew. Then Clerke's stern answer was
that unless the bones of Cook were brought to the ships, both native
villages would be destroyed. The two savages were former friends of
Cook's and warned the whites not to be allured on land, nor to trust
Koah, the leper priest, on the ships.
Again the conch-shells blew their challenge all night through the
darkness. Again the war fires danced; but next morning the guns of the
_Discovery_ were trained on Koah, when he tried to come on board. That
day sailors were landed for water and set fire to the village of the
cocoanut groves to drive assailants back. How quickly human nature may
revert to the beast type! When the white sailors returned from this
skirmish, they carried back to the ships with them, the heads of two
Hawaiians they had slain. By Saturday, the 20th, masts were in place
and the boats ready to sail. Between ten and eleven o'clock in the
morning, a long procession of people was seen filing slowly down the
hills preceded by drummers and a white flag. Word was signalled that
Cook's bones were on shore to be delivered. Clerke put out in a small
boat to receive the dead commander's remains--from which all flesh had
been burned. On Sunday, the 21st, the entire bay was tabooed. Not a
native came out of the houses. Silence lay over the waters. The
funeral service was read on board the _Resolution_, and the coffin
committed to the deep.
{208} A curious reception awaited the ships at Avacha Bay, Kamchatka,
whence they now sailed. Ismyloff's letter commending the explorers to
the governor of Avacha Bay brought thirty Cossack soldiers floundering
through the shore ice of Petropaulovsk under the protection of pointed
cannon. Ismyloff, with fur trader's jealousy of intrusion, had warned
the Russian commander that the English ships were pirates like
Benyowsky, the Polish exile, who had lately sacked the garrisons of
Kamchatka, stolen the ships, and sailed to America. However, when
Cook's letters were carried overland to Bolcheresk, to Major Behm, the
commander, all went well. The little log-thatched fort with its
windows of talc opened wide doors to the far-travelled English. The
Russian ladies of the fort donned their China silks. The samovars were
set singing. English sailors gave presents of their grog to the
Russians. Russian Cossacks presented their tobacco to the English,
adding three such cheers as only Cossacks can give and a farewell song.
In 1779 Clerke made one more attempt to pass through the northern
ice-fields from Pacific to Atlantic; but he accomplished nothing but to
go over the ground explored the year before under Cook. On the 5th of
July at ten P.M. in the lingering sunlight of northern latitudes, just
as the boats were halfway through the Straits of Bering, the fog
lifted, and for the first time in history--as far as known--the
westernmost part of America, Cape Prince of Wales, and the {209}
eastern-most part of Asia, East Cape, were simultaneously seen by white
men.
Finding it impossible to advance eastward, Clerke decided there was no
Northeast Passage by way of the Pacific to the Atlantic; and on the
21st of July, to the cheers of his sailors, announced that the ships
would turn back for England.[3]
Poor Clerke died of consumption on the way, August 22, 1779, only
thirty-eight years of age, and was buried at Petropaulovsk beside La
Croyére de l'Isle, who perished on the Bering expedition. The boats
did not reach England till October of 1780. They had not won the
reward of twenty thousand pounds; but they had charted a strange coast
for a distance of three thousand five hundred miles, and paved the way
for the vast commerce that now plies between Occident and Orient.[4]
[1] The question may occur, why in the account of Cook's and Bering's
voyage, the latitude is not oftener given. The answer is, the
latitudes as given by Cook and Bering vary so much from the modern, it
would only confuse the reader trying to follow a modern map.
[2] This is the Ismyloff who was marooned by Benyowsky.
[3] The authority for Cook's adventures is, of course, his own journal,
_Voyage to the Pacific Ocean_, London, 1784, supplemented by the
letters and journals of men who were with him, like Ledyard, Vancouver,
Portlock, and Dixon, and others.
[4] In reiterating the impossibility of finding a passage from ocean to
ocean, either northeast or northwest, no disparagement is cast on such
feats as that of Nordenskjöld along the north of Asia, in the _Vega_ in
1882.
By "passage" is meant a waterway practicable for ocean vessels, not for
the ocean freak of a specially constructed Arctic vessel that dodges
for a year or more among the ice-floes in an endeavor to pass from
Atlantic to Pacific, or _vice versa_.
{210}